It's time for the oldschool wiki to follow our established policies on granting administrator and bureaucrat status. These are found at RuneScape:Requests for adminship.

Historically, OSRSW has had a significantly smaller base of user activity and editors compared to RSW. During this time there was not much of an editor community, so admins were assigned at the discretion of our bureaucrats without on-site discussion.

Now that Old School is the more popular game, the site activity has dramatically increased. Our wiki has forked, and the site's relevance in the general OSRS community has become even greater. Acknowledging our official RFA process will help establish Old school admins as responsible representatives elected by the community. I see this as a bridge to help Old school administrators place more appropriately within the established wiki community. We have a reliance and expectation that site-wide decisions be determined by consensus in a community discussion.

Technically we should have been following our adminship processes all along, and we did previously have four RFAs, but the most recent of these was in May 2014. This proposal is that all future users granted administrator and bureaucrat privileges on the OldSchool Runescape Wiki will need to first complete a successful RFA or RFB.

Clarification: No existing admins/bureaucrats will be affected by the outcome of this proposal.

The following users already have some level of rights, and will be grandfathered for the purposes of this proposal.

In addition, User:Noodle Princess had a successful RFA but later went inactive. Following the usual procedure, Noodle Princess can request their rights back at any time by contacting a bureaucrat.

All other users not explicitly listed here would need to apply for adminship at RS:RFA. The current timeframe is that an RFA should last between 1-2 weeks. If this proposal is successful, some wording on RuneScape:Requests for adminship/Guide may need to be modified accordingly.

Discussion

Support — I thought it's a little weird that there's a procedural page for RFAs but it's not used. Despite the lower level of community interaction on the wiki itself, I think it would be good to allow everyone to weigh in for future adminships. --laagonetalk 19:27, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

Support/Comment - I do think that going forward RfAs will be needed simply to uphold the type of site this is. Technically nothing has been stopping anyone from creating an RfA and having it run its course, and having that upheld, but I realise this is more about making it mandatory. I do, however, have a couple concerns/questions. You mentioned Noodle Princess as being able to return as they were desysopped for inactivity, however the way you worded it implies that only they can do that. Would this extend to *everyone* who has been desysopped for inactivity alone, such as User:HeirApparently, or User:Icejunito? Moreover, how do we intend to handle people who have desysopped themselves? It's commonplace for people temporarily desysop themselves while they're dealing with real life things, and I would certainly hope they would be welcomed when they want at a bureaucrat's discretion.

I'd also like to propose a time frame to be set in stone to allow for desysops regarding inactivity. I believe it should be lenient, but perhaps this is best suited for a different discussion entirely. --ScuzzyBeta 19:57, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

Support - While the past few years it's been me handing out admins to those that I deem would make good use of them, there is a need for RfAs to not only make the process formal, but to also have admins from other Weird Gloop wikis take us a bit more seriously and see us as more than just "an admin on the OSRS Wiki". -- SpineTalk 20:20, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

Support - Lets be very clear that there is no written grandfathering policy on the osrsw, given the contention regarding this subject on RSW I strongly believe we should not be implementing this alongside an RFA system.

I'd also support a time frame before desysoping for inactivity as described by Scuzzy. The administrative role is not a status symbol, and shouldn't be treated as one, if someone does not use nor need the tools they simply shouldn't have them. Furthermore for those that are desysop'd, that at a later date require the tools, then they can go through the RFA process again. iN008talk 21:04, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

Support IN008 - RfAs are nice, it would be best to avoid the inactive admin drama in advance to avoid the literal shitstorm on the RSW everytime it comes up. 04:10, 25 January 2019 (UTC)

Support - An excellent idea. I would also be fine with some reasonable inactivity policy, like removal if there are no logged admin actions within the last year. Given the somewhat limited amount of admin work to be done by casuals here, that could be expanded to edits or logged actions too. And I have no problem going through the process myself if I wanted the sysop bit back, though grandfathering other former admins only removed for inactivity seems reasonable. Adragon111 (talk) 06:23, 25 January 2019 (UTC)

Support - It always felt weird to me that we have an RfA process but very rarely use it. Another benefit of having a more concrete process is that it would (hopefully) paint a better picture of what admins actually do and what sort of tools the applicants are applying for, rather than someone's name turning red in the discord one day and it being unclear what that really means. BigDiesel2m (talk) 13:14, 25 January 2019 (UTC)

Comment - I have expanded the RFA discussions into two more threads, with the intent of scoping each issue to avoid lack of consensus in a single thread. Let's keep this discussion just around the bolded statement above: all future users granted administrator and bureaucrat privileges on the OldSchool Runescape Wiki will need to first complete a successful RFA or RFB. The other threads can cover retroactive RFAs and inactive admins respectively. Riblet15 (talk) 00:05, 27 January 2019 (UTC)

Closed - RfAs will now be a mandatory process to become admin on the Old School RuneScape Wiki. The questions of how we will handle inactive admins & retroactive RfAs will be continued in the appropriate threads. --ScuzzyBeta 21:00, 31 January 2019 (UTC)